Practice Symposium uses the academic framework of a symposium in a different way by proposing practices instead of papers.

International and Swedish practitioners in choreography and performance are invited to share practices with each other and oustide participants. Invited artists are : Eleanor Bauer (USA, BE) , Valentina Desideri (IT/NL), Juan Dominguez (ES), Nilo Gallego (ES) , Rosalind Goldberg (SE/DE) , Sandra Lolax (SE/DE), Stina Nyberg (SE), Halla Ķlafsdķttir (IS/SE), Petra Sabisch (DE) , Manon Santkin (FR ; BE) och Mårten Spångberg (SE). The event is open and free for professionals after sign up.
The Practice Symposium gathers practitioners in the field of choreography and performance to share practices with each other and the public. Set up as an encounter of different practices, the Practice Symposium uses the academic framework of a symposium in a different way by proposing practices instead of papers.

In the recent years the notion of practice has frequently occured within the field of choreography, especially when insisting on a development achieved through continuity, a specific form of producing work and sharing experiences as much as a way of challenging knowledge. A practice addresses a particular idea or problem through a process of repetition. Emerging from specific defining parameters, sometimes in view of method, practices produce a know-how that cannot be separated from the particularity of the practice. This particularity arises from its being implicated into a specific materiality : there is no idea without a material expression, as much as there is no knowledge unless it is practiced. Engaging in these experience-based and usage-oriented practices allows for a cooperative knowledge production, where learning, doing and thinking intertwine.

With the guiding idea that each practice produces an intrinsic knowledge by being practically involved in its doing, this symposium of practices invites practitioners in the field of choreography and performance to share their practices.

The two-day Practice Symposium (29-30 September 2012) will take place in the studios at Konstnärsnämnden in Stockholm and consists of two parallel panels of practices. Based on the idea that a practice is done repeatedly, the second day of the symposium will consist of the exact same panels as the previous. Thus, during the symposium, you can either choose to partake in all practices or to do some of them twice.

We invite everyone interested to take part in the Practice Symposium. It is favourable to join the whole weekend but also possible to take part in specific panels. A more detailed program will be published on the website soon. The event is free. The Swedish Arts Grants Committee is situated at Maria Skolgata 83

In order to participate, please sign up by sending an e-mail to anna.efraimsson@konstnarsnamnden.se including name, email, telephone number and a short line on who you are and what you do. Wait for confirmation.

The Practice Symposium is hosted by Stina Nyberg, Zoë Poluch, Petra Sabisch and Uri Turkenich in collaboration with The International Dance Programme at The Swedish Arts Grants Committee (Konstnärsnämnden).

Biographies :

Eleanor Bauer (USA, BE) is an American choreographer and dancer based in Brussels. She studied at Idyllwild Arts Academy, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and P.A.R.T.S.. As a performer, Bauer has worked with David Zambrano, Mette Ingvartsen, Trisha Brown, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker/Rosas, Xavier Le Roy, and Boris Charmatz. Her pieces have toured internationally to critical acclaim and her writings on dance has been published in New York’s Movement Research Performance Journal, Maska (Ljubjana), and NDT by Contredanse (Brussels), as well as in various publications by Sarma, everybody’s, Nadine, and P.A.R.T.S, among others.

Valentina Desideri (IT/NL), is a performer and choreographer. She works freelance in several projects and keeps an active involvement in creating her own conditions of work. She graduated in 2006 from the Laban Centre in London and in the same year got the DanceWEB scholarship at the ImpulsTanz festival in Vienna. In August 2007 she co-organized ‘Sweet and Tender Collaborations/SKITE 2007’, a one-month residence for 35 international artists in PAF – Performing Arts Forum – France, where she is now based.

Juan Domínguez (ES), born in Valladolid in 1964, is a performer and a choreographer. He studied dance and video in Spain and the USA and received various grants to study in Movement Research, New York. Since 1987, he has worked as a performer and artistic assistant, and since 1992 he has developed his own work, questionning the medium of performance as well as time and space as parameters of dance. Exploring the relation between the differents codes, his performances tend towards a complete dissolving of the borders between fiction and reality. His most recent works are The Taste is Mine (2000), All Good Spies are my Age (2002), The Application (2005), the 7th act for the opera Seven Attempted Escapes from Silence (2005), Shichimi Togarashi (2006), All Good Artists my Age are Dead (2007), the research project From… to… (2007), Don’t Even Think About It (2008), and Blue (2009). Since 2003, he directs and programs the Festival In-Presentable in La Casa Encendida, Madrid.
Nilo Gallego (ES) is a musician - he plays drums, percussion and electronics, and performs testing performances using sound as a starting point. He has worked with choreographers Olga Mesa, Martine Pisani, Amalia Fernandez, Marisa Elena Love and Alonso, as well as managers theater Rodrigo Garcia, Carlos San Martin and Thomas Aragay and documentary filmmaker Chus Dominguez. He teaches sound art workshops for children and adults.

Rosalind Goldberg (SE/DE) began her dance career performing original Isadora Duncan choreographies with Lilla Baletten which then became the Isadorabelles, and then later the D Company. She completed her professional training at the Stockholm Balettakademien and moved to Berlin in October 2007. She performs with a Swedish choreographer in Sweden and tours her own performance works to Copenhagen, and Denmark. Rosalind is a member of the Let’s Talk About Love cast in Berlin.
Sandra Lolax (SE/DE) was born and raised in Vaasa, Finland. She got her education at Balettakademien in Stockholm. Since 2007 she has been working freelance as a performer with her base in Berlin and Finland. Sandra has performed in works by choreographers as Stina Nyberg, Rosalind Goldberg, Maya Lipsker, Miriam Horwitz, Anne Mareike Hess and Carl Knif. In 2010 she made an adaptation of the solo Art and Life by Deborah Hay. During the last couple of years she has started to expose her own work. The first example of this is the solo performance “And I’m ready for action” which was performed at Weld in Stockolm in 2011. The solo is part of the project Fake somatic practice, that Lolax initiated in 2010 together with Rosalind Goldberg and Stina Nyberg.

Halla Ólafsdóttir (IS/SE) is based in Sweden working as dancer and choreographer. In 2010 she has been touring her piece “It’s definitely the spiritual thing” in Europe. She was a part of INPEX editorial team for the production and making of the book “The Swedish Dance History” at the ImPulsTanz festival 2010. She recently worked as a choreographer and dancer with Dorte Olesen for the piece “The Bad The Good The Ugly”.
Manon Santkin (FR, BE) lives and works in Brussels. She started her contemporary dance education in 1998 at the Lycée Martin V of Louvain-la-Neuve and continued at P.A.R.T.S. where she graduated in 2004. Since 2003, Manon has involved herself in the creation of projects as a dancer, performer, collaborator as well as mentor and assistant. While continuing to work for and with other artists, she develops her own work in which the question of the dispositive (of presentation but also for working) is always very present. She is the initiator of the project By-product, a collaboration with choreographer/dancer Leslie Mannčs and fashion designer Jennifer Defays (www.by-product.be). Since 2003, Manon Santkin has collaborated regularly with choreographer Mette Ingvartsen, and since 2005 she has also worked regularly with Salva Sanchis. In 2004, she lead a series of workshops on movement and instant composition for actors and non professional dancers. Occasionaly Manon also mentors student works at Parts. In 2010, Manon worked on two new projects : Dolby (with Lucia Glass) and Performance Kit (with Leslie Mannčs).

Mårten Spångberg (SE) is a performance related artist, choreographer and theoretician living and working in Stockholm. He has been active on stage as performer and creator since 1994, and has since 1999 created his own choreography’s from solos to larger scale works. With the architect Tor Lindstrand he initiated International Festival, an interdisciplinary practice merging architecture and choreography/performance. Since 1996 he has organized and curated festivals in Sweden and internationally. He initiated the network organization INPEX in 2006, with which he also publish The Swedish Dance History. He has thorough experience in teaching both theory and practice. Between 2008 -2012 he was the director of the MA program in choreography at the University of Dance in Stockholm.
Stina Nyberg (SE) comes from Sweden where she makes and performs choreography. She graduated from the MA in choreography at DOCH in Stockholm in January 2012. During her studies she has to a large extent worked collectively with her fellow students and has through working with international choreographers, artists and theorists expanded her choreographic work. She is interested in choreographic methods and the notion of practice, and has created practice-based performances and a workshop in the political practice Radikal Aktiveringsteknik. During 2012 she has worked as a performer with Andros Zins-Browne, Mårten Spångberg and Sidney Leoni. Stina has been working in several collaborative projects, most recently with Rosalind Goldberg and Sandra Lolax within the project Fake Somatic Practice. This autumn she will rework her solo Loudspeaking, made within that project, during a residency at Movement Research in New York. At the moment, Stina is making a piece for the Swedish Ballet School to be performed at the Opera in September.

Zoë Poluch (CA/SE) These days, Zoë wonders how and what a local practice can be, compelling her to decipher what ‘local’ and ‘practice’ really want. The practice at stake is choreography and she recently finished an MA at the University of Dance in Stockholm where she focused on initiating alternative models of working together thinking choreography as a structural and organizational capacity. The local is, at this moment, Stockholm where she engages in dancing, choreographing, organizing, performing, and reading with the likes of Gunilla Heilborn, Mårten Spångberg, mychoreography, Enlightenment Hearts, amongst others. She still works in Brussels and Montreal respectively as a dancer and project archeologist.

Petra Sabisch (DE) is working as a choreographer and philosopher. Currently, Sabisch is Visiting Professor in Dance Studies at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in the University of Giessen, directing the M.A. "Choreography and Performance". Most recent artistic works encompass method, unplugged (Madrid, In-Presentable 2012) and the Conversation Piece (Berlin, 2008), and a new piece is programmed for January 2013 in Berlin. Artistic collaborations e.g. with Antonia Baehr, Alice Chauchat, Mette Ingvartsen and Mårten Spångberg. Since 2005 Sabisch has been involved in the development of the open group Everybodys that centres around the exchange & open source distribution of methodologies & practical know-how between art practitioners as well as in the artist-run Performing Arts Forum PAF in France. In 2010 Sabisch is awarded the doctor of philosophy with her book Choreographing Relations. Practical Philosophy and Contemporary Choreography in the works of Baehr, Deleuze, Dominguez, Guattari, Le Roy and Salamon. In 2011, Sabisch receives the award for dance studies (tanzwissenschaftspreis) by Tanzarchiv Köln and the Minister of Innovation, Research and Education in NRW. Sabisch is lecturing, practicing and teaching in key art institutions in Europe (e.g. at the Inter-University Center of Dance Berlin, Université Paris 8, Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Cologne, the University College of Dance Stockholm, Tanzquartier Wien).

Uri Turkenich is a dance and performance related artist currently residing in Stockholm, he has been active in the field of performance and choreography since 2003. In his works he is concerned with notions of change, Vitalism and the Marxists idea of social relations. Lately he graduated from the MA program for Choreography at the University of Dance in Stockholm where he continues to create performances alone and in various collaborations settings.